With Gifts and Bullying, West Seeks to Shape Bosnia Vote
ORASJE, Bosnia-Herzegovina — With elections a few days away, Bosnia's international overlords gave this war-battered town a $1-million water-supply system this week. Then they got rid of the mayor.
Schoolchildren who had gathered to sing thanks for the gift giggled as U.S. Ambassador Richard Kauzlarich mused that the 53,000-gallon storage tower looked like a giant ice cream cone.
"To grow up strong and healthy, you need clean water, so the people of the United States provided the money that made this possible," the ambassador told those assembled, giving equal credit to Kresimir Zubak, the politician who had lobbied for the project and stood beaming at his side.
Struggling to enforce Bosnia's peace accords, the United States and its Western allies have organized this weekend's nationwide vote and tried, with beneficence and bullying, to sway the outcome. They hope that moderates such as Zubak will unseat the entrenched Croatian, Muslim and Serbian nationalists who resist the mandate of rebuilding Bosnia-Herzegovina as a multiethnic state.
Two days after the ceremony for the shiny new water tower, Orasje's municipal landscape changed again: Mayor Marko Benkovic, who had intimidated supporters of Zubak's new party, resigned Thursday at the insistence of Carlos Westendorp, the senior Western diplomat overseeing the peace accords.
In addition, the mayor and 14 other candidates of the nationalist Croatian Democratic Union were removed from the ballot for what Western election supervisors deemed unfair practices--biased coverage aired in Bosnia by neighboring Croatia's state television and politicking by ethnic Croat army soldiers.
Change in Power Not a Sure Bet
Despite such intervention, the voting today and Sunday may not break the hard-line party's control of this town or achieve more than a slight softening of the country's inter-ethnic confrontation, according to Western diplomats, Bosnian officials and independent monitors.
Bosnia's 2.7 million voters are choosing members of a three-member presidency, with one representative from each ethnic group. They are also electing deputies to the national parliament and to assemblies of the two autonomous regions of postwar Bosnia--the Serbs' Republika Srpska and the Muslim-Croat Federation--as well as a president in the Serb entity.
The elections are the fifth in Bosnia since the November 1995 accords signed in Dayton, Ohio, halted 43 months of ethnic warfare.
